The discovery of a five-million-year-old whale graveyard in the Atacama Desert, led by British scientists from the University of Oxford, is being hailed as a 'breakthrough'. But let us pause before we uncork the champagne. This find, a mass stranding of dozens of ancient whales, is not merely a curiosity.
It is a mirror held up to our own civilisation. What caused these titans of the deep to beach themselves en masse? Algal blooms, toxic tides, seismic upheaval?
The same forces, amplified by human activity, threaten our own shores today. The Victorians would have seen this as a testament to progress, to the human mind unravelling nature's secrets. But we, the decadent inheritors of that age, should see it as a warning.
For every artefact we dig from the earth, we are reminded that empires, species, and entire ecosystems eventually return to dust. This graveyard is a memento mori for the age of the Anthropocene. Let the scientists marvel.
The rest of us should prepare for our own mass stranding.
